Thinking people are stupid is the gateway drug to worse ideas
I’m highly allergic to the idea that other people are fundamentally stupid. It’s one small, flimsy step away from dehumanizing people completely, and once anyone is dehumanized, that leads to a lot of worse ideas.
If we can go from “only kings and dukes could possibly become less stupid” to “anybody can become less stupid,” maybe we can make it all the way to “people aren’t fundamentally stupid to begin with.”
Getting there requires giving up on the very seductive idea that your mind just happens to contain every true belief. When people like the things you hate, when they vote for the wrong guy, when they devote their lives to things you think are pointless, the easiest way to deal with them is to assume that God didn’t put enough neurons in their heads. If only their brain functioned properly, like yours does! Then they’d see.
I think that we can outgrow our need for that idea. And I sure hope we do, because “people are stupid” is the gateway drug to a lot of worse ideas. When you write someone off as a moron, you suspend diplomatic relations; you declare war. This works the other way around, too—how can you have anything other than open hostilities with someone who has decided that your brain doesn’t work? —Adam Mastroianni, The Radical Idea That People Aren’t Stupid
- see also: the most hideous ideologies are the ones we believe without realizing it — if we think other people are stupid, that gives us the right to be authoritarian asshats, which: WRONG! NO!
- see also: we discount censorship when its motives are good — because “the good guys” can’t do bad things, right?
- previously: if your mind contains every right belief, then it’s real easy to consider others as corrupted, hence why purity and supremacy go hand in hand